The logic of this 'failed encounter' bears witness to the Frankfurt School's conception of psychoanalysis as a 'negative' theory: a theory of self-alientated, divided individuals, which implies as its inherent practical goal the achievement of a 'disalientated' condition in which individuals are undivided, no longer dominated by the alientated psychic substance (the 'unconscious')--a condition thereby rendering psychoanalysis itself superfluous. However, Freud continued to conceive of his own theory as 'positive', describing the unalterable condition of civilization. Because of this limitation--that is to say, because he comprehended 'repressive sublimation' (traumatic repression qua the underside of sublimation) as an anthropological constant--Freud could not foresee the unexpected, paradoxical condition actualized in our centiry: that of 'repressive desublimation', characteristic of 'post-liberal' societies in which 'the triumphant archaic urges, the victory of the Id over the Ego, live in harmony with the triumph of the society over the individual'.
The Ego's relative autonomy was based on its role as the mediator between the Id (the non-sublimated life-substance of the drives) and the Superego (the agency of social 'repression', the representative of the demands of society). 'Repressive desublimation' succeeds in getting rid of this autonomous, mediating agency of 'synthesis' which is the Ego: through such 'desublimation' the Ego loses its relative autonomy and regresses towards the unconscious. However, this 'regressive', compulsive, blind, 'automatic' behaviour, which bears all the signs of the Id, far from liberating us from the pressures of the existing social order, adheres perfectly to the demands of the Superego, and is therefore already enlisted in the service of the social order. As a consequence, the forces of social 'repression' exert a direct control over drives.
The bourgeois liberal subject represses his unconscious urges by means of internalized prohibitions and, as a result, his self-control enables him to get hold of his libidinal 'spontaneity'. In post-liberal societies, however, the agency of social repression no longer acts in the guise of an internalized Law or Prohibition that requires renunciation and self-control; instead, it assumes the form of a hypnotic agency that imposes the attitude of 'yielding to temptation'--that is to say, its injunction amounts to a command: 'Enjoy yourself!'. Such an idiotic enjoyment is dictated by the social environment which includes the Anglo-Saxon psychoanalyst whose main goal is to render the patient capable of 'normal', 'healthy' pleasures. Society requires us to fall asleep, into a hypnotic trance, usually under the guise of just the opposite command: 'The Nazi battle cry of "Germany awake" hides its very opposite.'
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